Improve Your Small Business Social Media Strategy in 10 Minutes a Day

One common thing I hear from small business owners is the difficulty in finding things to post on their social media profiles, especially Facebook and Twitter. Fortunately, there is a simple solution to finding valuable content to share on both platforms and it’s free.

The often overlooked Google Alerts, www.google.com/alerts, is one of the better free tools available to small business owners. In order to maximize what you get out of Google Alerts, it’s important to have a strategy for setting it up.

Small Business Use of Google Alerts

Google Alerts allows you to set up an email alert for any topic you choose. When curating content for a global insurance broker, I found it efficient to have individual alerts set up for each topic I was looking to curate content. So, I would receive a daily email of all the news related to that topic. One advantage for those who cover a larger area or broad industry is the potential to find a plethora of related articles.

It definitely becomes more difficult the smaller the area you are curating information for. During my time owning a virtual real estate brokerage, I set up a Google Alert for the local town and area.

This allowed me to grow a following outside of just the small number of people who normally “like” a company Facebook page. Sharing good local information had the biggest correlation to growing a larger following.

Maximize Your Social Media Strategy

If your business is consistently sharing valuable localized news, other Facebook or Twitter users in the area will take notice and you will begin to see greater interaction and growth. Setting up a few alerts takes around 10 minutes and takes less than 10 minutes a day to review.

For less than an hour a week, you can keep your social media profile growing. If you’re looking to maximize efficiency, be sure to have a social media scheduling tool like Buffer or HootSuite set up so you can easily add the worthwhile links to your profiles.

For those business owners looking for maximum efficiency, I would be sure to have Start A Fire, set up as well.

(If you’re unfamiliar with Start A Fire, I put together a recent review, but it allows you to increase engagement with links you share on social media via an overlay.)